The New York Review of Books engagement report
@nybooks - 2.1M followers on X
Measured over 265 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 25, 2026.
Engagement
A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 265 original posts, its engagement rate beats 7% of 20,444 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 4.9K times each, and 0.225% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.238% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 9.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 265 posts sampled, 99% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 945 interactions, about 86x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.
Measured over 265 original posts from a 30-day window, last computed on October 25, 2026. Recurring tags: #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.
Compared with accounts its own size
The New York Review of Books's engagement rate beats 7% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (20,444 accounts, accounts of similar size (decile 10 of 10)). A percentile is spread evenly by construction, so 50 really is the middle of that group and 90 really is its top tenth.
On engagement per impression rather than per follower it beats 16% of the same group. When those two numbers disagree, the gap is about how far its posts travel rather than how people react to them.
Where this sits in the catalog
At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 205,152 accounts in this comparison. That places it in the bottom 25% band, which runs below 0.024%.
Show the percentile table
| Percentile | Engagement rate |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | 0.004% |
| 25th percentile | 0.024% |
| 50th percentile | 0.143% |
| 75th percentile | 0.678% |
| 90th percentile | 2.55% |
| 99th percentile | 82.4% |
This ruler is the whole measured catalog, not a size-matched group: it shows where the raw rate falls across every account we can measure, all of which are large. For a like-for-like comparison, read the size-band percentile above instead. See how the bands are built
Posting timing
This account posts most often around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day of the week. The bars below are the catalog-wide pattern, with this account's own busiest slot marked. They do not show how this account performs at each hour: we keep one aggregate per account, not one per hour, so that measurement does not exist in our data.
Show engagement by hour posted, utc as a table
| Hour (UTC) | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 UTC | -1% | 89K |
| 01:00 UTC | -2% | 90K |
| 02:00 UTC | -3% | 88K |
| 03:00 UTC | -4% | 94K |
| 04:00 UTC | -5% | 76K |
| 05:00 UTC | -4% | 75K |
| 06:00 UTC | -5% | 86K |
| 07:00 UTC | -5% | 93K |
| 08:00 UTC | -4% | 108K |
| 09:00 UTC | -4% | 124K |
| 10:00 UTC | -3% | 129K |
| 11:00 UTC | -3% | 141K |
| 12:00 UTC | -3% | 154K |
| 13:00 UTC | -3% | 167K |
| 14:00 UTC | -4% | 173K |
| 15:00 UTC | -2% | 176K |
| 16:00 UTC | -3% | 171K |
| 17:00 UTC | -3% | 159K |
| 18:00 UTC | -2% | 149K |
| 19:00 UTC | -2% | 141K |
| 20:00 UTC | -1% | 131K |
| 21:00 UTC | 0% | 116K |
| 22:00 UTC | -2% | 100K |
| 23:00 UTC | -1% | 90K |
Show engagement by day of week as a table
| Day | Vs author median | Posts |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | +5% | 393K |
| Monday | +1% | 483K |
| Tuesday | -2% | 520K |
| Wednesday | -3% | 472K |
| Thursday | -2% | 430K |
| Friday | -3% | 447K |
| Saturday | +2% | 393K |
Formats this account uses
Its own posting mix on the left, and what each of those formats does across every account we track on the right. Only formats where the effect clears our publish test appear here, so an empty row is a format we could not measure rather than one that does nothing.
| Format | This account | Catalog effect | 95% interval | Accounts behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image or video | 0% of posts | +111% | +108% to +115% | 34K |
| Outbound link | 99% of posts | -41% | -42% to -40% | 32K |
| Typical length | - | no effect | -2% to -1% | 42K |
- 0% of this account's sampled posts carry an image or video. Across the catalog, posts with an image or video run 111% above the same accounts' other posts.
- 99% of its posts carry a link off X. Across the catalog, posts with an outbound link run 41% below the same accounts' other posts, so a large share of this account's output sits in the weakest bucket we measure.
- Its average post runs 193 characters, which falls in the 180 - 280 characters band. Across the catalog, posts of 180 to 280 characters match the same accounts' other posts almost exactly.
These are catalog-wide differences applied to this account's own posting mix, not a measurement of how each format performs for this account specifically. We keep one median per account, not one per format per account, so the second thing is not something this data can tell you.
Best tweets
- Oct 8, 202686x their median
Congratulations to Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. https://t.co/p6iUafoipH
- Aug 16, 202626x their median
"Like all ingenues, she is blonde and has precisely two enemies" I reviewed Maddie's Secret for the NYRB: https://t.co/jAF4c54mHl
- Sep 16, 202622x their median
“Neither the political left nor the Muslim world...has in the past century offered a form of anti-Jewish prejudice anywhere near as coherent, influential, and dangerous as that of their right-wing counterparts.” —Omer Bartov https://t.co/psyCA9Y52X
- Oct 13, 202615x their median
Some of America’s most influential AI leaders believe advanced AI could secure permanent American global supremacy. Are they right? That conviction has received too little scrutiny at home—but considerable attention in Beijing. I examine it in my new essay for @nybooks. The new AI primacists envision what I call “recursive advantage”: AI enabling the leading country to advance so quickly that no rival can ever catch up. The hope of securing that dominance—and the fear of falling permanently behind—give both Washington and Beijing reasons to keep accelerating, even as the risks of losing control grow. There are strong reasons to maintain an American lead in AI. But securing the benefits of staying ahead does not require a permanent monopoly. Read it here: https://t.co/ykmKcS3qHX
- Aug 21, 202612x their median
“We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.” —@AgnesCallard, in conversation with Merve Emre https://t.co/56iHZwjIQW
- Aug 25, 202611x their median
After reading Wolfgang Koeppen’s novels, “I wondered what on earth had just happened to me; it seemed I’d been tuned, sharpened, elasticized—reformulated with better neurons.” —Deborah Eisenberg https://t.co/Z8oqUg1iIz
- Oct 4, 202611x their median
Peter E. Gordon on the legacy of Jürgen Habermas https://t.co/hgvCk0Sq1G
- Sep 29, 202610x their median
Václav Havel on how to defy an authoritarian state https://t.co/rvwvKePFjG
- Sep 30, 20269.2x their median
“What we are witnessing is a spectacle of computational power staged to acquire market share, and with it control of a landscape that extends well beyond mathematics.” —Dan Rockmore https://t.co/Nmkrzwot2f
- Aug 25, 20268.4x their median
Yiyun Li on Qian Zhongshu’s satirical masterpiece, Fortress Besieged https://t.co/CWlgtAcQlh
Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.
Recurring topics
The most frequent hashtags in the sampled posts. They describe what this account writes about; they are not a performance signal, and the catalog-wide breakdown on the hub shows how little hashtag count moves.
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Reading these numbers
A typical post picks up 11 interactions against 2.1M followers, an engagement rate of 0.001%. Measured over 265 original posts, its engagement rate beats 7% of 20,444 tracked accounts of a similar size. That is a reason to look at how the audience behaves - reply depth, saves, whether the followers are recent - rather than a conclusion about it on its own. Posts are seen about 4.9K times each, and 0.225% of those impressions turn into an interaction. That is about 0.238% of the follower count, which is the gap between an audience on paper and an audience in a timeline. Posting runs at about 9.4 posts a day over the last 30 days, with activity on almost every day in the window. Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is the busiest day of the week. Of the 265 posts sampled, 99% link out. The account's strongest tracked post pulled 945 interactions, about 86x its own typical post. Recurring topics include #dante, #goethe, #petrarch.
- What is The New York Review of Books's engagement rate on X?
- The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) has an engagement rate of 0.001%, based on the median interactions across 265 original posts from the last 30 days against 2,052,277 followers. Replies, reposts and quote-posts of other people are excluded from that sample.
- Is that a good engagement rate?
- At 0.001%, The New York Review of Books sits below the 10th percentile of the 205,152 accounts in this comparison. Those comparison accounts are all large ones, because our scanning cadence is weighted towards big accounts, so this is a ranking among peers of similar scale rather than a ranking across X.
- Does @nybooks have real engagement?
- Its engagement rate beats 7% of the tracked X accounts closest to it in follower count (20,444 accounts), which puts it in the bottom 10% for its size group. Ranking inside a size band matters because engagement rate falls as accounts grow, so a raw rate would mostly re-measure the follower count. It is a starting point for a look at follower quality, not a verdict on it.
- When does @nybooks post?
- Most posts go out around 15:00 UTC, and Friday is its busiest day, at roughly 9.4 posts per day across the measured window.